Like this:

My week off was kind to my creative side, I blogged every day, I wrote some more of SFU and partook in some “free writing” to help get the old noggin firing on all cynlinders.

Nine days and just over one working week later and I’ve not even looked at the blog let alone started writing for it and SFU has started to accumulate dust once again, although on the up side my 30 day trial of Scriviner will now last me beyond pay day meaning I should be able to upgrade to the full product.

What bought me back to the blogosphere and writing a post was plain and simple.. guilt.

This week I have been nominated for an award, now if my sporadic posting habits and inconsitant quality control where not good enough reasons to guilt me into posting, I was also nominated by Wife, who has managed to consistently stick to a post a day schedule.

There are stipulations to receiving the award and various tasks that must be completed upon acceptation, but I think I need to get a little run of posts going before I feel comfortable enough receiving it.

Like this:

I attended my Sister’s wedding, spending time with family that I don’t usually get to see all that much. I have played a LOT of League of Legends, I’ve kept pretty up to date with my Blog (although im not yet back to post a day status) and I have managed to write some (albeit it not a lot) more of So Far untitled.

But now it’s time to return to work, don’t get me wrong I enjoy my job but it’s always tough to find the motivation to return after an extended period away.

This entire preamble really is just a way to link in with the “Best Job In the World”, a PR campaign by the Australian tourist board.

A few years back they offered one lucky winner the chance to have the “Best job in the World,” this year they have not one but six different options. Not only are these “jobs” amazing they even come with a significant pay-packet, a whopping $100,000 AUS

If any of the below take your fancy then you only have a few days left to apply!

I came up with what I thought was a pretty cool idea yesterday, I have a lot of different people who read my blog, some creative, some authors, some real life friends and a surprisingly regular amount of people researching Theodore “ted” Lewin.

I thought what could be interesting would be to tap into the joint imagination of all my readers and start a story written by all of us. My original idea was a paragraph each, I then revised this to a Sentence and then after a conversation with Wife to a word.

It turns out that this is a game that she plays in her Drama classes to get the imagination of her children flowing.

To keep it from getting lost within the normal Blog I have created a separate page for this to be housed, ideally, dependent on success, at the end of each week I’ll compile what has been written so far and we can carry on in a never ending story!

If it garners some interest I would like to follow up in a week or two expanding it to be a sentence each, as I think in the long run this could prove to be a more readable story, but if I do that I think ill start again from scratch!

You can (and should) post as many times as you like but please make sure you follow the rules below.

You can only post one word at a time

You must allow two people to post in-between each of your words

Punctuation does not count as a word

Please make sure that you tell as many people as you can about this idea, either through your own blogs or other social media as the more involvement there is the longer and most likely more ridiculous the story will be!

I stated at the time how odd I found it that the Fantasy Genre is picked upon more than others, considering that it is by far the smallest section in any bookshop I have visited and the fact that I can count the number of contributions to TV & Film on one hand.

Wife suggested that perhaps I should give the same treatment to other genres and create their own exam to be taken before beginning their journey into their own chosen genre.

So I did.

The Crime Fiction Writers Exam

Is your main character an aging detective with a drink problem?

Or winding down to retirement?

Or the department “bad boy”?

Or a maverick loner?

Or have an estranged Wife?

Or a dead wife?

Or emotionally damaged?

Or a veteran cop who has just got a rookie partner?

Or a hardnosed woman trying to make it in mans world?

Does that rookie partner throw up the 1st time they enter the morgue?

Does your main character have nothing to do with law enforcement, but has an uncanny ability to solve crimes?

Are they police happy about when this happens?

Does your main characters boss ever say “ill have your badge for that”?

Do you have a good cop/bad cop scene?

Is your main character Belgian?

Scottish?

Swedish?

At any point does your main character put themselves in a dangerous situation without informing anyone where they are going?

When they do so does their phone run out of battery?

Or loose signal?

Does your main character hook up with the 1st female Lawyer that they meet?

How about Doctor?

How about Coroner?

How about Journalist?

Is the title of your novel a line from a Nursery rhyme?

Does your main character take of his sunglasses and make a witty pun at every crime scene?

Does your Novel contain a two digit body count?

Does your body count equate to ½ the population of the town the novel is set in?

Are any of the characters based on the “murder mystery” dinner party you recently attended?

Or hosted?

At any point does your main character get all the suspects in one room and discuss their whereabouts during the time of the murder?

Does your main character at any point say “Elementary”?

At any point does a female character fell like she is being “watched” but tells no one about it?

Does your main character bump into the killer and not even know it?

Or just miss them when visiting an apartment?

Or arrest them but then let them go because their clearly innocent?

And then realise in the final chapter that they weren’t and it all fits together?

Does your main character end up as the killer’s final target despite in no way fitting the pattern of their previous victims?

Please feel free to suggest any additions and Ill add them to the list.